a shooting star above my valley
William Butler Yeats and Willie Mays
LET’S say that your poems wear old Wellington boots and walk through mud on the way to the market. At the market people buy these poems even though they are rather worn and dirty. Frayed at the ends. Threadbare poems. Used. Let's say that the hopes of your early years are not the hopes you have now. Once you wanted so much, but now? Some sleep. A day where things don't hurt so much. What things? Your feet. Your empty house. In fact, let's say that the sun skips your house today, all the other houses have sunshine. Not yours. Let's say that it is time for goodbye. Let's say you have become a memory.
jobe
November
Trees have no politics. They shrug off
green and take on crimson and russet.At the clinic a family rushes to the elevator
from the parking lot. Daddy
pushing Mommy in a wheelchair.“Daddy, you’re so big!” says the little girl
as they all sidle into the elevator going down.
“Daddy will always be big,” I pipe up.I haven’t seen Daddy
since I was three. Outside on the streetliquidambar and Chinese pistache
and the translucent egg-yolk yellow
of the gingkoes.They turn and come straight in, facing us.
Mommy holds her prosthetics on her lap,
three limbs amputated, smooth
and bare as leafless trees, healed stumps
at the joints––the elbows and the knees.When the elevator lands, Daddy
sends the wheelchair fast, through a patio
lined with Bartlett pear trees, the children
scampering alongside.I stand in their wake and weep.
Jane Blue
Jane was a friend of mine, now crossed over. She is missed. If you don’t know her work, Google her. When I moved to the Sacramento Valley from San Francisco it was very pleasing to get to know poets like Jane, Annie Menebroker, Jose Montoya, Francisco X. Alarcon, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Viola Weinberg, and Andy Jones.
jobe
IN the end the earth reclaims all
who will honor the late citizens when the city is gone
when the city returns to the earth
forgotten
and no longer even has a name
where an immense urban ghost hovers above the trees
where the city once stood
when structural ghosts have replaced
the crumbling buildings and highways
wisps in the night fog and no one to remember
in the end the earth reclaims all
wisps in the night fog
wisps in the night fog
jobe
The Cold Heaven
Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939 CE
Willie B is my poetry hero, if I may be allowed such fancy. I named a son after him, well, Yeats and Willie Mays (my baseball hero). Wherever I have wandered or settled in this ridiculous world, I have had him with me. As a very young fellow I came across Yeats ‘selected poems’ in a used bookstore. Well-worn. Fifty cents. I carried that thing around this whole country and across two marriages. Little by little I read all of his poems and plays, not just the selected ones. There’s something to said for reading things as the writer wished them to be presented. After the pandemic was over, on a whim, I gave the book to another poet.
jobe
THERE was a shooting star above my valley
and I thought “take me with you”
why not
I have had a good walk on this earth
found a corner where I fit in
and lived a life there
why not shoot across the universe
in a wild ball of flame and disappear in a flash
do you think I planned to live forever
jobe
If They Should Come for Us, a poem by Fatimah Asghar: CLICK HERE
Fatimah, they/them, is a young poet, which doesn’t say much, hell, you’re a young poet until you’re 50 or so, and they are much younger than that, but very accomplished. On the link where their poem is, read the bio. I’m a huge fan.
That’s enough for this time. Thanks for reading this.
jobe
